A decade ago, Americans most often identified “traditional” security threats, like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and energy security, as the most pressing national security threats that the United States faced. Today, while these traditional threats remain on the table, they are joined by a set of “non-traditional” security threats, ranging from the effects of climate change to racial and economic inequality in the United States.

Much like the end of the Cold War and the September 11 attacks, 2020’s convergence of crises is testing Americans’ mental model of what national security means. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare governments’ limited ability to keep people safe. It exposed the inadequacy and inequities of public health systems, plunged the global economy into recession, disrupted supply chains, tested alliances, and accelerated conflict.¹ A movement for racial justice in the United States has demonstrated ways that systemic racism undermines American leadership abroad and institutions at home.² Incidents of political violence in the United States are linked to a global surge in right-wing extremist violence.³ Disinformation is increasingly coming not just from foreign actors attempting to interfere in our elections, but from Americans themselves intent on heightening and weaponizing our divisions.⁴ Rising economic inequality has stifled the growth of the middle class and contributed to negative health, education, and social outcomes. Twenty-two natural disasters cost the U.S. government a record $1 billion in 2020, highlighting that climate change is barreling forward in the face of an inadequate and polarized response.⁵ And political polarization has warped Americans’ trust in our democratic institutions at home, accelerating all of these challenges and impeding our ability to effectively respond to them.⁶

The idea that theoretical definitions of security do not align with most peoples’ lived experiences is not new. As Under Secretary of State-designate and WCAPS Founder Bonnie Jenkins points out, “The way that the U.S. defines threats does not adequately capture the challenges many people of color feel in America.”⁷ But these trends have once more made it clear that our traditional understandings of security do not capture the lived experiences of many today.

The image of violent right-wing extremists taking over the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 as Congress voted to certify the election encapsulated a number of these trends. Analysts and the media struggled to position the event in the context of American history. Rather than bring the public together in condemnation of the rioters, the event and its coverage did nothing to reduce polarization. Again, none of our traditional security tools, including $700 billion plus in annual defense spending, seemed responsive to a very real threat.

This convergence of crises has generated an inflection point for the post-1945 liberal world order, exposing weaknesses in an order that the United States helped create and championed. These growing fissures in America’s domestic social contract make us vulnerable to the risks posed by crises that do not respect borders.

While the threat landscape 10 years ago was by no means simple or easily solvable, the additional challenges we face today may be even more complex.

Neither researchers and practitioners nor the publics we serve have the language, let alone the policy, to begin confronting the national security challenges we currently face. This report maps how Americans’ perceptions of what constitutes a national security threat have changed over the past ten years, and especially over the past year. We also analyze media conversations about the pandemic and national security to consider whether how we talk about national security has evolved to meet these challenges.

Our analysis also suggests that, a year into the pandemic, the substantial challenges posed by emerging security threats are not being met by new frameworks for thinking about and addressing these challenges. We identify two critical gaps. First, we lack frameworks that update the construct of security that we have to match the challenges we face. Second, the narratives we do have about those challenges are different or even diametrically opposed across political and identity-based lines.

This has profound implications for the future of U.S. security policy. It is a commonplace of international relations theory, across ideologies, that a nation must have foundational consensus, or at least public acquiescence in an elite consensus, in order to conduct effective policy. Existing security policy thinking offers very little on what it looks like for any society, much less a democracy, to build security for a country whose residents lack shared conceptions of what threats they face. We offer a set of findings and recommendations to help begin to face that challenge squarely.

• U.S. society’s definition of national security threats is shifting, highly politicized, and closely tied to identity. The dynamics of the 2017-2020 period clarify a long-brewing trend; the post-Cold War United States has failed to develop a durable consensus understanding of what constitutes a national security threat. Instead, the notion of security threat, which was always a tool in U.S. politics, has also become a political prize, and public views change in response to elite partisan cues. Legacy national security institutions and modes of thinking persist, and have become a source of power for political factions.
• Existing narratives and theories of international security are insufficient when traditional as well as transnational threats affect and are in turn affected by choices involving domestic, international, and non-governmental actors. Similarly, challenges that are classed as purely domestic—polarization, political violence, or the functioning of internal institutions, such as public health systems—are also both affected by and potentially weapons in cross-national conflict.
• The national security narrative has not caught up with either the shifts or the reification of threat perception: We conducted content analysis of opinion pieces in major media sources’ coverage of security and the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying the most prominent debates about how the United States should respond to the pandemic as a national security threat. Our findings showed that while writers initially grappled with the potential for massive change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, within a couple of months the debate had settled towards conventional framings, such as how the pandemic will affect China’s rise, the international order, and globalization. Analysis of interlocking developments, such as the economic crises, issues with vaccine distribution, political violence, and the divergent effects of these crises on communities of color and women, remained largely absent from the security/foreign policy discourse.
• The national security narrative is reactive, and may be reverting to our pre-2020 understandings: While early coverage of the pandemic in relation to national security soared, this framing has since declined in the media landscape. Since we have not developed significant new frameworks for talking about these national security challenges over the past year, it is likely that our national security conversation will simply revert to something similar to its pre-2020 state. This trend means that national security policy is diverging further from U.S. domestic politics as it considers, contests, and in some instances incorporates conceptual frameworks such as systemic racism, gender, and class lenses.
• The national security narrative is not people-centered: What does it mean to have a national security discourse that is largely focused on systems, not people, during a pandemic? Has a national security community that has failed to protect people from a pandemic failed at its task? What would it look like to develop a people-centered national security narrative? We have largely failed to acknowledge the importance of these questions, let alone address them.

Reconceptualize security policy for a highly polarized society. Thinking of all ideological stripes about U.S. foreign policy assumes a shared underlying public consensus about the security threats the country actually faces, or at least a public consensus to let elite experts take the lead. Those conditions simply don’t exist today, and domestic polarization means that even very serious challenges are unlikely to produce a bipartisan consensus about national security priorities in the near future. Our fsurvey analysis highlights increasing public polarization over foreign as well as domestic policy issues. Policymakers and theorists should pay rigorous and realistic attention to what few shared foundations can be teased out, and how they might be maintained against polarization. Analysts and policymakers will also need to determine what can be achieved, and what achievements can be sustained over time, in areas of national security where there is partisan disagreement. This concern is increasingly central to policymaking, and to U.S. allies and partners.

Develop paradigms to talk about new national security issues: We will need to develop new language, frameworks, and policy solutions to address these new security issues. For the pandemic, for example, we will need to address questions like:

• How should we confront economic stratification within and between nations, and stratification of vaccine distribution?
• How can we prevent the next pandemic?
• How can we better equip state and local governments to increase infectious disease testing, increase the amount of hospital beds per capita, and distribute vaccinations to people from every economic background, regardless of citizenship?

Re-evaluate international institutions: Today, the international order consists largely of twentieth-century international institutions that are not equipped to respond to the complex twenty-first-century challenges that we identify in this report. International institutions have always been the sites of competition among the major powers, but they were designed for a world in which military, political, and economic power were overwhelmingly held by states—and disproportionately held by the United States and its allies. With power redistributed, but the institutions still in their old forms, it has become dauntingly difficult to achieve transformative results. We are no longer looking at adjusting institutions at the margins—rather, this moment calls for a more systematic approach to reforming international institutions. Researchers and practitioners must drive conversations about what a renovated international system might look like, and which international institutions need to be jettisoned or revamped to confront this new set of security and foreign policy challenges.

Encourage democratic participation in foreign policymaking: The changing nature of our national security challenges suggests not just a rethink of what national security is, but who it is for. Since the post-World War II period and the creation of the modern liberal world order, American politicians have typically insisted that “partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” while political scientists have dismissed the impact of public opinion on foreign policy as largely irrelevant. At the same time, advocacy coalitions have recently emerged around foreign policy issues like U.S. support for the war in Yemen and efforts to combat climate change. We should encourage such efforts to engage Americans in conversations about reimaging national security.

Expand the discussion about what it means to integrate domestic and foreign policy. Increasingly, these critical security challenges require an integrated foreign and domestic policy approach. Analysts and policymakers need to grapple with fundamental challenges: Does this mean reconfiguring institutions such as the Foreign Service or the National Security Council? Retraining professionals to be able to take on and manage integrated portfolios? Remaking oversight, including that of Congress? Redefining or jettisoning the construct of foreign policy? 

Today, the United States faces an unprecedented array of traditional and new security threats. From the global pandemic and climate change to resurgent domestic violent extremism and a crisis of racial injustice at home, these crises interact with each other to present a threat matrix that cannot be solely addressed either at the international or the domestic policy level or by simply reverting to old paradigms and theories. As the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance states, “We cannot pretend the world can simply be restored to the way it was 75, 30, or even four years ago. We cannot just return to the way things were before. In foreign policy and national security, just as in domestic policy, we have to chart a new course.”⁸ We will need to develop new ways of thinking about national security, and with them new tools for policymaking and for hearing what our fellow Americans have to say about these problems.

Much like the end of the Cold War and the September 11 attacks, the convergence of crises brought on in part by the COVID-19 pandemic is testing Americans’ mental model of national security. The pandemic has laid bare governments’ limited ability to keep their people safe. It exposed the inadequacy and inequities of public health systems, plunged the global economy into recession, disrupted supply chains, tested alliances, and accelerated conflict.⁹ A movement for racial justice in the United States has demonstrated ways that systemic racism undermines American leadership abroad as well as institutions at home.¹⁰ Incidents of political violence in the United States, including the emergence of an increasingly networked white supremacist movement, are linked to a global surge in extremism.¹¹ Disinformation is increasingly coming not just from foreign actors attempting to interfere in our elections, but from Americans themselves intent on heightening and weaponizing our divisions.¹² Rising economic inequality has stifled the growth of the middle class and contributed to negative health, education, and social outcomes. Twenty-two natural disasters that cost the U.S. government a record $1 billion in 2020 highlighted the destabilizing effects of climate change.¹³ And political polarization has warped Americans’ trust in our democratic institutions at home, accelerating all of these challenges and impeding our ability to effectively respond to them.¹⁴

The image of violent right-wing extremists taking over the Capitol building on January 6 as Congress voted to certify the election encapsulated a number of these trends. Analysts and the media struggled to locate the event in the context of American history. Rather than bring the public together, the event and its coverage did nothing to tamp down polarization. Again, none of our traditional security tools, including $700 billion plus in annual defense spending, seemed responsive to a very real threat.

We don’t have the language, let alone the policy, to begin confronting the national security challenges we currently face. In this report, we seek to map how national security threats have changed over the past 10 years, and especially over the past year, and where the ways we talk about national security have failed to evolve to meet this challenge. We begin with an analysis of several highly-regarded surveys of U.S. public opinion and the Director of National Intelligence’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment to understand how Americans’ perceptions of the security threats that we face has changed. We then turn to a media content analysis of opinion pieces in major media sources’ coverage of security and the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying the most prominent debates about how the United States should respond to the pandemic as a national security threat. We conclude with a set of recommendations for addressing the gap between perceptions of the threats we face and our frameworks for addressing them.

Americans’ perceptions of the national security challenges we confront—and indeed, the issues that policymakers and the American public identify as security threats—have changed repeatedly over the last three decades, with change accelerating over the past 10 years. Our analysis of several surveys of U.S. public opinion finds that a decade ago, while Americans’ views had changed since the end of the Cold War, through 2010 they still most often identified “traditional” security threats, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and energy security, as the most pressing national security threats that the United States faced. Survey respondents were also less likely to identify great power competition, whether with China or Russia, as a critical threat.

Today, while these traditional threats remain on the table, they are joined by a set of non-traditional security threats, ranging from the effects of climate change to racial and economic inequality in the United States. These changes in the United States occurred against a global backdrop of the 2008 Great Recession and uneven recovery; the end of an immediate post-Cold War trend of declining conflict and democratic expansion; the return of American perception of threat from terrorism, which had been in slow decline after 9/11; and a global uptick in complex humanitarian emergencies.

While the U.S. threat landscape 10 years ago was by no means simple or easily solvable, the additional challenges we face today may be even more complex. We propose that these new types of security threats hinge on interdependencies and can broadly be broken down into two categories: transnational threats and domestic-foreign nexus threats.

Transnational threats cross the boundaries of foreign and domestic policy, involve non-state actors, and require solutions that fall outside of traditional national security silos. They must be addressed at a global as well as a domestic level, and can only be solved with innovative forms of international cooperation that will require the cooperation of an array of actors, including states, international organizations, NGOs, for-profit companies, scientists, and more.¹⁵

As we explain in the next section, the United States also now faces a set of what we term “nexus threats,” such as political polarization. Until very recently the political violence that arises out of the combustible mix of political polarization and extremism would not have been flagged as a security threat in part because it emerges from domestic politics, typically seen as wholly separate from the foreign policy arena. Tackling many of these issues will involve structural-level domestic reforms, like advancing racial equity and building trust in democratic institutions, which are typically seen as far from the realm of national security.

The question of which domestic concerns rise to the level of a national security challenge is now a matter of partisan contestation, with centrist forces focusing on extremism and violence, while progressive voices add racial and other forms of injustice. Nationalist conservative voices propose immigration as a threat to domestic safety, while progressives see migration as a global humanitarian challenge. Moreover, although these concerns are domestic in origin, they have significant transnational elements, from the “push” factors of migration to transnational criminal networks. Political polarization is therefore a security threat unto itself as well as an accelerator of other threats, like domestic violent extremism and dis/misinformation.¹⁶ The January 6 insurrection was both a specific example of the problem of polarization and a general demonstration of the threat that white supremacism poses to democracy.

Of course, we must also acknowledge that the idea that our theoretical definitions of security do not align with most peoples’ lived experiences is not new. Indeed, the human security paradigm that evolved out of the milestone 1994 UN Development Report identified the need to shift the security lens from an emphasis on military power to a focus on the human needs of freedom from want and freedom from fear. But while the human security paradigm had some resonance in international organizations, it had very little uptake in the United States. In recent years, new focus has emerged on how different communities within the United States, particularly the most vulnerable, view security. As Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins points out, “The way that the U.S. defines threats does not adequately capture the challenges many people of color feel in America.”¹⁷

In order to track changing perceptions in the national security threats that America faces, and to identify whether and how those threats have evolved over the past decade, we compared the findings of three highly-regarded surveys that track Americans’ views on international security and foreign affairs: the annual Chicago Council Survey,¹⁸ the annual Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey,¹⁹ and TRIP (Teaching, Research, & International Policy) Project’s October 2020 Snap Poll.²⁰

Each survey asked respondents to identify whether they believed a list of security issues constitute a critical or major threat faced by the United States. These surveys’ findings are necessarily circumscribed because they ask respondents to respond to a set of threats pre-identified by the survey administrators: many surveys have only begun to ask about pandemics as a national security threat in the past few years, for example. Nevertheless, they offer a clear picture of how perceptions of the national security threats that the United States faces have evolved over the past decade.

Table 1 compares the top 10 threats most often identified as critical threats by respondents in the Chicago Council Survey in 2020, 2010, and 1998.²¹ In 2010, Americans responding to the Chicago Council Survey identified international terrorism and nuclear proliferation most often as critical threats. The survey frames the basket of issues related to climate change around potential interruptions to energy supply and dependence on foreign sources of oil. China as a world power was ranked 13th, with 43 percent identifying it as a critical threat: While on the list of issues, great power competition with China did not rank as highly.

In some ways, the priorities of 2010 do not represent a major shift from 1998, when concerns about international terrorism and chemical, biological, and nuclear proliferation topped the list. China’s role vis-à-vis the United States and “large numbers of immigrants and refugees coming into the country” also remained on the list. However, issues that we might associate with the concept of human security, such as climate change/global warming and “AIDS, the Ebola virus, and other potential epidemics” which made the top 10 list in 1998, had fallen out of the top by 2010. Americans also had concerns about Japan as a global economic competitor with the United States in 1998, although by the late 1990s, U.S. trade anxiety about Japan had already begun to diminish.

Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy dependence, and even great power competition—these are all framings of security that strategists in the 1970s or 1980s understood and had the policy frameworks at hand to address. These historical framings shaped the bureaucratic development of the national security bureaucracy and research agenda over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In 2020, respondents prioritized several non-traditional security issues as the most critical threats we currently face. While long-standing security issues like terrorism and nuclear proliferation remained, the list of most critical threats in 2020 added a number of issues that many would not even have identified as potential national security threats a decade ago or more, and would instead have been viewed as domestic political issues or as "soft" security issues.

The COVID-19 pandemic—a new threat in 2020—has risen to the top of the list. Other issues including the global economic downturn, domestic violent extremism, political polarization in the United States, and foreign interference in elections also appear as top concerns. China as a world power rose to the top three critical threats. International terrorism remained a top threat, but was identified by fewer respondents as a critical threat than in 2010 and the preceding decade.

However, the survey also reveals a growing partisan divergence. On climate change, China, and immigration in particular, the Chicago Council noted in 2019 that “the gap between Democrats and Republicans is at record highs,” with Democrats more likely to identify climate change as a threat, and Republicans much more likely to see a rising China and immigration as security issues. In general, Democrats are more likely to select non-traditional issues like climate change (75 percent identified as a critical threat in 2020) and the pandemic (87 percent) as critical challenges, while “Republicans identify traditional security challenges as the most critical threats facing the country, including the development of China as a world power (67%), international terrorism (62%), and Iran’s nuclear program (54%).”²²

Democrats and independents, meanwhile, were less likely to identify “large numbers of immigrants and refugees coming into the U.S.” as a critical security issue in 2020 than they were in 2002 or even 2010. The same is not true of Republicans.²³ In 2019, the Chicago Council found that “more Republicans consider large numbers of immigrants and refugees coming into the United States a critical threat than any of the other 13 potential threats presented (78%). While immigration is the top threat for Republicans, only two in 10 Democrats (19%) view it as a critical threat—ranked lowest among all threats presented. This 59-percentage-point difference between partisan groups is the highest registered gap since the Council first asked the question in 1998.”²⁴

These views appear to be shaped by political polarization and by messaging from elites to mass audiences, or "elite cues." The literature suggests that partisan divergence tends to be stronger on issues like immigration or defense spending that are more closely linked to domestic policy than on more traditional foreign policy issues, like arms control or trade.²⁵ In an already-partisan environment, the public’s receptiveness to elite cues is shaped more sharply by partisan divergence.²⁶ Elite factionalization, when political leaders come to see the democratic process as a zero-sum competition for political power, has steadily worsened in the United States over the past several years, according to the Fragile States Index.²⁷

Trend lines over the last decade, and the accelerating effect of both the pandemic and the January 6 insurrection, suggest that security issues—or indeed, the U.S. political arena more broadly—are unlikely to become less polarized in the near term. This trend has profound implications for national security narratives—and for the future of U.S. security policy itself. It is a commonplace of international relations theory, across ideologies, that a nation must have foundational consensus, or at least public acquiescence in an elite consensus, in order to conduct effective policy. We have very little thinking on what it looks like to build security for a country whose residents lack shared conceptions of what threats they face.

Pew Research Center’s 2020 Global Attitudes Survey surveyed respondents on a different set of potential threats but found similar results: while respondents identified terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons as major threats, the spread of infectious diseases topped the list for the first time. Only 2 percent of respondents said that infectious disease was not a threat. “Concerns about China and the condition of the global economy have also been on the rise,” note the studies’ authors. “The survey,” which was conducted on March 29, 2020, in the midst of the first spike in COVID-19 cases, “found that worries about both the threat of infectious diseases and the condition of the global economy rose after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on March 13.”

This shift towards non-traditional security issues appears even more significant amongst those who study these issues closely. The 2020 TRIP survey found that while both the general public and international relations scholars ranked non-traditional issues like climate change and infectious disease as top security concerns, scholars were much less likely to identify more traditional security topics—namely, terrorism, China and Russia’s power and influence, and nuclear proliferation—as major threats when compared to the U.S. public.

Finally, there is evidence that younger Americans’ views on national security threats are changing even more rapidly than the country as a whole. A recent Carnegie Endowment study on the foreign policy views of Generation Z noted that this generation cares “more about issues like climate change and human rights than war or great power competition. Nearly half of Generation Z say U.S. foreign policy should prioritize combating climate change; only 12 percent say it should focus on countering Chinese aggression.”²⁸ A 2019 Center for American Progress survey found that compared to other generations, Generation Z was more likely to rank combatting climate change, fighting global poverty, and promoting human rights as one of their top three U.S. foreign policy priorities, while they were less likely to select “protecting against terrorist threats from groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda” as a top-three issue.²⁹ While younger generations are often more progressive than those above them and may become more moderate over time, Generation Z is also coming of age in a world that looks very different than it did for previous generations.³⁰

Another way to measure perceptions of the most pressing national security threats that we face is through the unclassified section of the Worldwide Threat Assessment,³¹ testimony delivered annually by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. This testimony outlines the U.S. intelligence community’s perspective on the most preeminent threats that the United States faces.

An analysis of these assessments from 2010 to 2019, the year of the most recent public assessment at the time of writing,³² shows remarkable stability in many of the top threats identified by the U.S. intelligence community. Terrorism, cybersecurity, weapon of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, and counterintelligence have all been featured consistently as key threats since 2010. More recently, elections interference, space and counter-space, and emerging technologies have also been added.

But there has also been a consistent acknowledgement of non-traditional sources of security threat. Both health security and climate change each had their own sections in the assessment in 2010, when DNI Dennis Blair testified, “We continue to assess that global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the next 20 years because it will aggravate existing world problems—such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions—that threaten state stability.”³³

Likewise in 2010, a section on “Strategic Health Challenges and Threats,” notably written during the Swine flu pandemic, pointed out that “significant gaps remain in disease surveillance and reporting that undermine our ability to confront disease outbreaks overseas or identify contaminated products before they threaten Americans.”³⁴

In the 2015 assessment, these issues were merged into an overarching “Human Security” section, which persisted through the most recent assessment in 2019, which included “emerging infectious diseases and deficiencies in international state preparedness to address them,” extreme weather events in combination with water and food shortages, and political instability. The 2019 assessment noted that “the United States will probably have to manage the impact of global human security challenges, such as threats to public health, historic levels of human displacement, assaults on religious freedom, and the negative effects of environmental degradation and climate change.”³⁵

Our analysis of how Americans’ perceptions of security threats have changed over the past decade shows that:

• Threats to U.S. national security have shifted significantly over the past decade, and even the past year: Traditional security threats like terrorism, WMD proliferation, and energy dependence have not gone away, but have been joined by a range of non-traditional security threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of infectious disease more broadly, climate change, and political polarization. Compared with other issues, immigration is on the whole less likely to be identified as a critical security threat, although there is substantial partisan divergence. By their very nature, these emerging national security issues go beyond traditional conceptions of national security, and will require us to develop alternative frameworks and policy solutions in order to effectively address them.
• Emerging security threats may be divided loosely into two categories: transnational challenges and domestic-foreign nexus challenges. While there is of course some overlap between these two categories, and each have significant domestic and international ramifications, transnational issues spread across borders and involve cooperation from a wide range of state and non-state actors to solve, including adversaries like China. Domestic-foreign nexus issues largely originate at the domestic level in the United States (although they too have transnational connections and international ramifications). These issues will require structural reform and are politically contentious.
• Partisan divergence will make it more difficult to agree on a shared narrative. Political polarization is itself a threat to U.S. national security, as well as an accelerant of other important threats, such as domestic extremist violence and mis/disinformation, and a barrier to addressing other threats, such as climate change and the emergence and spread of infectious disease. At the same time, many of these threats have become politicized in the context of American politics, such that addressing climate change or domestic extremist violence is often viewed as taking a side. Political obstruction and dysfunction in our institutions of governance, such as Congress, will make these threats even more difficult to address. There is even significant partisan divergence among Americans about the most critical threats that we face as a country. All of this will make it difficult to agree on a shared national security narrative, let alone a shared approach to dealing with these critical security threats.

While national security threats have evolved significantly over the past decade and especially over the past year, we wanted to know whether our narratives around these threats have also evolved to meet this challenge. The newness and complexity of these transnational and domestic-foreign nexus threats demand original and innovative frameworks for talking about and addressing these challenges. Has the national security community risen to the task of developing these frameworks over the past year?

To investigate whether public narratives about security and ideas for addressing these security challenges have changed over the same period, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative media analysis specifically around health and national security. The COVID-19 pandemic was the threat most often identified as critical in the 2020 Chicago Council Survey, and health security is a concept that has gained credence over the past decade or so. By digging deeper into narratives around COVID-19 and health security, we can build a picture of whether and how our conversations around health and the pandemic have evolved to propose a comprehensive security framework that offers policy solutions to this emerging set of challenges.

To begin our assessment of whether our narratives have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we first look to understand how media coverage of the pandemic as a national security issue changed over the course of 2020. We use MIT Media Lab’s Media Cloud tool, an open-source text corpus of online media stories from thousands of news sources.⁴³ By tracking the number of stories published each month on these topics since March 2020, we are able to study how the media ecosystem around the pandemic and national security has changed over the course of the year.

Our findings suggest that U.S. news media coverage of health and national security jumped dramatically at the start of the pandemic. The figure below shows the number of media stories published per month including health and national security. These numbers remained relatively low prior to March 2020—despite warnings from the intelligence community that health security was an important issue and experience with prior pandemics like the swine flu—although they did increase steadily since 2010.

However, despite a large jump in approximately March through May 2020, over the course of 2020, the number of stories that mentioned health, the pandemic, and national security has steadily declined, aside from a spike in coverage in October 2020, likely due to the rising number of cases in the United States and coverage of the issue in the lead-up to the November elections. This suggests that coverage viewing health through the lens of national security threat has declined after a brief surge in interest in the spring of 2020. Further research is needed, however, to develop a deeper understanding of these trends.

While the quantitative analysis provides a broad overview of coverage of the pandemic as a national security issue, we next dig deeper into the substance and framing of this coverage. We conducted content analysis of opinion pieces in major media sources’ coverage of security and the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative analysis sought to identify the most important debates about how the United States should respond to the pandemic as a national security threat.⁴⁴

We identified three conceptual paradigms encapsulating how the national security community is publicly wrestling with what the COVID-19 pandemic is and what it means for how we think about national security.

Paradigm 1: Will the Pandemic Fundamentally Alter the International Order?

The first paradigm we identified assesses the potential effects of the pandemic on international order and the United States’s place in it. Debates within this paradigm centered on China’s rise and the United States’s relative decline.

A debate emerged within the first few months of the pandemic around what the pandemic will mean in terms of great power competition and whether and how it will affect the rise of China vis-à-vis the United States. Analysts pointed to China’s suppression of information about the virus in the beginning of the year, both countries’ failure to cooperate with the World Health Organization (WHO), and rising tensions between U.S. and Chinese leadership over how to confront the pandemic as potential accelerants of great power rivalry between the two countries.

Some authors thought that the pandemic would fundamentally change the international order, while others argued that it would either accelerate existing trends or not change much at all. Henry Kissinger wrote in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that the United States must “begin the urgent task of launching a parallel enterprise for the transition to the post-coronavirus order.”⁴⁵ Likewise, Thomas Wright wrote in the Atlantic, “COVID-19 is the fourth major geopolitical shock in as many decades. In each of the previous three, analysts and leaders grossly underestimated the long-term impact on their society and on world politics.”⁴⁶

Many, however, saw COVID-19 as an accelerant of existing trends in a changing international order, arguing, for example, that “although the pandemic does not appear to be reshaping the regional order in fundamental ways, it could well accelerate preexisting trends and bolster China’s position.”⁴⁷ Joseph S. Nye Jr. asked in the National Interest, for example, in an article titled “Why the Coronavirus Is Making U.S.-China Relations Worse,” whether the United States and China will be able to cooperate to deal with transnational threats like the pandemic while competing in other areas.⁴⁸ Likewise, Richard Haas argued in Foreign Affairs that “the pandemic will accelerate history rather than reshape it,” positing that the pandemic will accelerate the United States’s relative decline and the rise of challengers like China. Several authors considered what a new Cold War with China might look like and how it would differ from the twentieth century’s Cold War.⁴⁹ Others thought that worries about the acceleration of China’s rise were overblown and that the pandemic would have little effect on the international order.⁵⁰

Many of these articles viewed the pandemic through the lens of the United States and China’s struggle for global leadership, underscoring the difference in the Chinese and U.S. reactions to the virus and pointing to the Trump administration’s very public fumbles in controlling the virus, while China appeared to be using vaccine diplomacy to its advantage. Many lamented the lack of U.S. leadership during the global crisis, and argued that by failing to rise to the occasion, the United States would underscore that it is no longer the indispensable nation when it comes to addressing global crises. As Kori Schake put it in Foreign Policy, “The United States will no longer be seen as an international leader because of its government’s narrow self-interest and bungling incompetence.”⁵¹ Robert Zoellick lamented that “the Trump administration, which has conducted narrow transactional diplomacy, has not conveyed an impression of international leadership.”⁵²

Several authors, including Stacey Abrams, Nicholas Burns, Samantha Power, Michael H. Fuchs, and Frank L. Smith III, sketched out how the United States could take the lead in coordinating a global response to the pandemic—and how it failed to do so under the Trump administration. Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi argued in Foreign Affairs, “As Washington falters, Beijing is moving quickly and adeptly to take advantage of the opening created by U.S. mistakes, filling the vacuum to position itself as the global leader in pandemic response.”⁵³ Others, however, cautioned that despite the United States’s missteps, “The pandemic won’t make china the world’s leader,” noting that “there are real limits to China’s capacity to take advantage of the current crisis—whether through disingenuous propaganda or ineffective global action.”⁵⁴

Paradigm 2: Is the Pandemic Killing Globalization?

The second paradigm that we identified concerns the status of globalization in the wake of the pandemic, with authors debating whether and to what degree globalization will be shaped significantly by COVID-19. Several articles argued that the pandemic is killing—or at least substantially re-wiring—globalization.⁵⁵ As early as March 2020, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argued that COVID-19 is “shaping up to be an enormous stress test for globalization,” as the interconnected global economy makes countries and firms more vulnerable to shocks.⁵⁶ Philippe Legrain argued that COVID-19 is likely to “deal a blow to fragmented international supply chains, reduce the hypermobility of global business travelers, and provide political fodder for nationalists who favor greater protectionism and immigration controls,” thereby leaving a lasting impact on globalization.⁵⁷ Some argued that the pandemic would call into question many western companies’ reliance on China-centric supply chains, while others proposed the opposite—that the pandemic would heighten United States overdependence on this supplier.⁵⁸

In response to these massive shifts, pundits argued, countries and firms will need to “diversify suppliers to be less dependent on one country such as China and build stockpiles against future disruptions.”⁵⁹ The United States can also guard against future disruptions by “selectively decoupl[ing]” in high-priority areas.⁶⁰ Countries are likely to turn inward, some predicted, renationalizing supply chains or at least creating a robust backup capacity to backstop global supply chains.⁶¹ Some writers also suggest alternate forms of globalization that will emerge post-pandemic. Michael Klare predicted that deglobalization will lead to the “emergence of semi-autonomous regional blocs.”⁶² Others predicted a grimmer future, seeing attempts to divide the global economy “into self-reliant ‘bubbles’” that will limit growth and increase tensions among global powers.⁶³

In spite of the challenges, some authors argued that globalization would not be substantially altered by the pandemic. For example, Raphael Cohen argued in Lawfare that “globalization will persist” because the fundamentals of the global economic system remain the same: “Countries still need goods and services from one another, just as they have for thousands of years.”⁶⁴

Paradigm 3: Confronting the Human Impacts of the Pandemic

The third paradigm speaks to the human impacts of the pandemic, addressing questions about governance, health security, pandemic-related disinformation, vaccine distribution, and a variety of questions related to how the pandemic could affect the lives and well-being of most people.

One conversation within this paradigm looked at how this health crisis is affecting peoples’ everyday lives, and how we ought to change our notions of security accordingly. Notably, several of these pieces were authored by public health experts who might not normally be featured in the pages of foreign policy journals.

In Foreign Affairs, for instance, Jennifer Nuzzo argued that the pandemic should lead to “a fundamental change in the way that countries think about global health security,” and that countries must prepare for the next pandemic by cooperating with one another via international institutions like the WHO.⁶⁵ Joia Mukherjee, a doctor trained in infectious disease and public health, made the case even more directly, writing that the “pandemic has demonstrated that the national security of the U.S. depends on the country reckoning with its outdated health-care architecture.”⁶⁶ Mark Lagon and Rachel Sadoff wrote that the United States has the opportunity to build relationships in Africa via health diplomacy.⁶⁷

In addition to the health security conversation, several analytical threads touched on the human rights impacts of COVID-19. In the early months of the pandemic, some also worried that lockdowns and contact tracing could become excuses for authoritarian regimes to consolidate authority and increase repression of their own people. Authors worried that the pandemic could accelerate existing trends towards authoritarianism in countries like Hungary or Tanzania. Countries’ success in managing this potential crisis in governance “will be measured by their ability to galvanize political will, to demonstrate transparency in the collection and sharing of data, and to avoid politicizing the crisis.”⁶⁸ By late 2020, some had concluded that fears that the pandemic could accelerate democratic backsliding were unfounded,⁶⁹ with some even arguing that “the pandemic has eroded the power of authoritarians and the authoritarian-inclined.”⁷⁰ On the other hand, Freedom House’s 2021 report found that “COVID-19 has exacerbated the global decline in freedom…the changes precipitated by the pandemic left many societies—with varied regime types, income levels, and demographics—in worse political condition; with more pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities; and vulnerable to long-term effects.”⁷¹

Some authors began to link problems with our democracy at home and the effects of COVID-19 to national security. Susan Rice wrote in the New York Times in April that the United States must seize the COVID-19 crisis to ask “how we can emerge a more just, equitable and cohesive nation,” and in another piece in September that domestic political polarization is a force multiplier that makes threats like the pandemic more difficult to address.⁷²

A team of co-authors wrote about the gendered effects of the pandemic, which has damaged economic sectors that are dominated by women “while increasing the unpaid caregiving responsibilities that women disproportionately shoulder.”⁷³ Early on in the pandemic, Vera Zaken drew attention to the potential for pandemic-related disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories.⁷⁴ And Thomas Bollyky and Chad Bown pointed to inequities in global vaccine distribution, and how this collective action problem could be addressed through international cooperation.⁷⁵

Finally, several articles pointed the way towards reimagining security in the wake of the pandemic. Pieces in Just Security argued that the pandemic demonstrates how U.S. national security priorities do not address the most critical threats. Oona Hathaway wrote, for example, that the hundreds of thousands of COVID-19-related deaths show “that the fundamental goal of a national security program should be to protect American lives, then we clearly have our priorities out of place.”⁷⁶

At the same time, several analysts warned against securitizing the COVID-19 crisis, even as it is increasingly viewed as a national security threat. Brett Rosenberg and Mark Hannah warned in Foreign Policy, for example, that the United States must avoid the mistakes of the post-9/11 period even as we reorient to address new threats like the pandemic.⁷⁷ As Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper note in Just Security, “Pouring more resources into confronting threats shared by humanity as a whole—like infectious disease—is a welcome idea. But doing so chiefly by emphasizing the national security dimension of these challenges is a perilous strategy.”⁷⁸

Our analysis suggests that, a year into the pandemic, the substantial challenges posed by emerging security threats related to the COVID-19 pandemic are not being met by new frameworks for thinking about and addressing them. If we are unable to develop new ways of talking about and understanding these challenges, we will also be unable to develop innovative policy solutions—and we will fail to include the communities most affected by these challenges in policy conversations.

While analysts and broader national audiences see the pandemic as a critical security threat, the expert discourse on the pandemic has until now been primarily focused on debates around whether or not the pandemic will accelerate shifts in the international order and in globalization that many had already predicted. About half of the articles we analyzed in our content analysis fell into the first paradigm, and looked at questions like whether relative U.S. power is declining as a result of failed U.S. leadership in combating the pandemic, whether and how the United States should engage cooperatively with the rest of the world to address the pandemic, and what potential shifts in the international order could mean for competition with China. Approximately an additional 20 percent of articles addressed what the pandemic will mean for globalization.

In contrast, only a third of the articles we analyzed addressed the human impacts of the pandemic and confronting global challenges to health security. Of these articles, many pointed to the lack of frameworks and policy remedies to address these problems—a necessary step in generating new frameworks for policy thinking, but nonetheless a preliminary one. In other words, almost 70 percent of the articles we reviewed used existing frameworks to talk about an emerging challenge. While the questions these articles debated are important and worthy of conversation, they do not move the national security community towards challenging our current framings and conceptualizing new national security challenges in different ways. Additionally, while the first two paradigms were more coherent debates, and saw authors in conversation with one another, the third paradigm encompassed a much broader set of issues and was relatively inchoate.

Additionally, the character of pieces varied significantly by media outlet. For example, all of the pieces from Just Security fell into the third paradigm; many of the pieces we reviewed from Foreign Policy spoke to the second paradigm; and the pieces from Foreign Affairs were mostly in the first paradigm. Articles from the Wall Street Journal opinion section tended to have more traditional conceptions of security and many were written by long-standing members of the national security elite, such as Robert Zoellick, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Russell Mead, while the New York Times opinion section tended to feature younger but still very established voices, like Susan Rice and Samantha Power.⁷⁹ This suggests that the selection of media outlets matters when assessing both the character and quality of these conversations.

Finally, while the set of articles that fell within the third paradigm began conversations about crucially important issues, these conversations are not yet fully-formed debates. Questions remain to be addressed such as, how has pandemic-related disinformation spread and what should the national security do about it? How will the disparate impacts of the pandemic on women and communities of color affect national security? What will vaccine diplomacy interact with shifts in the global order in terms of who has access to the vaccine?

Most importantly, how do we put together these pieces to reimagine what security should look like?

• U.S. society’s definition of national security threat is shifting, highly-politicized, and closely tied to identity. The dynamics of the 2017-2020 period clarify a trend which was already present; the post-Cold War United States has failed to develop a durable consensus understanding of what constitutes a national security threat. Instead, the notion of security threat, which was always a tool in U.S. politics, has also become a political prize, and public views swing very rapidly in response to elite partisan cues. Legacy national security institutions and modes of thinking persist, and have become a source of power for political factions contending over what constitutes a threat against which they may be turned.
• Existing international security narratives are insufficient to address threats that affect and are in turn affected by choices in domestic, international and transnational (i.e. involving non-governmental actors) arenas. Similarly, challenges that are classed as purely domestic—polarization, political violence, or the functioning of internal institutions, such as public health systems—are also both affected by and potentially weapons in cross-national conflict.
• The national security narrative has not caught up with either the shifts or the reification of threat perception. While writers initially grappled with the potential for massive change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, within a couple of months the debate had settled towards conventional framings, such as how the pandemic will affect China’s rise, the international order, and globalization. Analysis of interlocking developments, such as the economic crises, issues with vaccine distribution, political violence, and the divergent effects of these crises on communities of color and women, remained largely absent from the security/foreign policy discourse.
• The national security narrative is reactive, and may be reverting to the mean. While early coverage of the pandemic in relation to national security soared, this framing has since declined in the media landscape. Since we have not developed significant new frameworks for talking about these national security challenges over the past year, it is likely that our national security conversation will simply revert to something similar to its pre-2020 state. This trend means it is diverging further from U.S. domestic politics as it considers, contests, and in some instances incorporates conceptual frameworks such as systemic racism and gender class lenses.
• The national security narrative is not people-centered. What does it mean to have a national security discourse that is largely focused on systems, not people, during a pandemic? Has a national security community that has failed to protect people from a pandemic failed at its task? What would it even look like to develop a people-centered national security narrative? We have largely failed to acknowledge the importance of these questions, let alone address them.

Reconceptualize security policy for a highly polarized society. International relations theories assume a national consensus, or at least a consensus to allow elite experts to take the lead on security goals and approaches. Those conditions simply don’t obtain; the experience of the pandemic suggests that even very serious challenges are unlikely to produce them in the near future. Our survey analysis highlights increasing public polarization over foreign as well as domestic policy issues. Policymakers and theorists would be well served by rigorous and realistic attention to what few shared foundations can be teased out, and how they might be maintained against polarization. For the broad swath of policy that will remain outside consensus, questions of durability and achievability against a polarized backdrop are now fundamental to policymaking.

Develop paradigms to talk about new national security issues. We will need to develop new language, frameworks, and policy solutions to address these new security issues, or those dimensions of them that we decide truly constitute security issues. This may involve both new security tools and the choice to work with some issues in a non-securitized framework.

Reevaluate international institutions. Today, the international order consists largely of twentieth-century international institutions that are not equipped to respond to the complex twenty-first-century challenges that this report identifies. International institutions have always been the sites of competition among the major powers, but they were designed for a world in which military, political, and economic power were overwhelmingly held by states—and disproportionately held by the United States and its allies. With power redistributed, but the institutions still in their old forms, COVID-19 confirms the last decade’s experience that it has become dauntingly difficult to achieve transformative results. We are no longer looking at adjusting institutions at the margins—rather, this moment calls for a more systematic approach to reforming international institutions. Researchers and practitioners must drive conversations about what a renovated international system might look like, and which international institutions need to be jettisoned or revamped to confront this new set of security and foreign policy challenges.

Encourage democratic participation in foreign policymaking: The changing nature of our national security challenges suggests not just a rethink of what national security is, but who it is for. Since the post-World War II period and the creation of the modern liberal world order, American politicians have typically insisted that “partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” while political scientists have dismissed the impact of public opinion on foreign policy as largely irrelevant. At the same time, advocacy coalitions have recently emerged around foreign policy issues like U.S. support for the war in Yemen and efforts to combat climate change. We should encourage such efforts to engage Americans in conversations about reimagining national security.

Expand the discussion about what it means to integrate domestic and foreign policy. This report notes that increasingly, these critical security challenges require an integrated foreign and domestic policy approach. But lip service to this idea has so far failed to grapple with challenges: Does this mean reconfiguring institutions such as the Foreign Service or the National Security Council? Retraining professionals to be able to take on and manage integrated portfolios? Remaking oversight, including that of Congress? Redefining or jettisoning the construct of foreign policy? 

Today, the United States faces an unprecedented array of traditional and new security threats. From the global pandemic and climate change to resurgent domestic violent extremism and a crisis of racial injustice at home, these crises interact with each other to present a threat matrix that cannot be solely addressed either at the international or the domestic policy level or by simply reverting to old paradigms and theories. As the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance states, “We cannot pretend the world can simply be restored to the way it was 75, 30, or even four years ago. We cannot just return to the way things were before. In foreign policy and national security, just as in domestic policy, we have to chart a new course.”⁸⁰ Instead, we will need to develop new ways of thinking about national security, and the policy tools we can bring to bear on these problems.